


be it ever so humble

by isawet



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-04
Updated: 2012-08-04
Packaged: 2017-11-11 09:58:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/477300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isawet/pseuds/isawet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Carter misses a lot of things. Home is only ever as good as the people in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	be it ever so humble

Sam will never get used to the stars on alien planets. The cultural quirks, the weird animals, the way Daniel prattles and the disdainful look Teal’c gives MREs all get to be routine, and even the jello creatures that one time don’t seem so strange now, after all these years, but the stars throw her every time. They’re unsettling, like when she was a kid and her brother moved her stuff around and she’d walk in and know something was wrong or different. Logically, she knows why they’re not the same as _their_ stars, Earth’s stars, but that doesn’t stop the dip her stomach makes when she looks up at night to a sky that’s not hers and sees the edge of a sun that doesn’t burn quite the same and the planetshine off the moons she doesn’t know the name of. 

 

 

She tries to tell Daniel once, when it was just them sitting on cracked and broken stone steps of the stargate, P90 slung casually across her lap and head tilted into the sun, watching rabbit-ish creatures run around in the grass. He frowns lightly at her, and moves his finger in a gesture to push up the glasses he doesn’t wear anymore. The muscles he didn’t used to have ripple under his vest as he gives her a small smile. _Don’t really know what you mean, Sam_ he says, and Sam is about to shrug it off when Mitchell and Teal’c break out of the treeline, sprinting flat out for them. Daniel throws himself at the DHD and Sam crouches, flicking the safety off her weapon, distantly wondering what could be malfunctioning with the radios. 

 

 _Don’t know what you mean, Sam_ he’d said, and she thinks he used to.

 

 

Once, when he was the Colonel and she was the Major he dragged the lot of them out of their bedrolls and doused the fire and they watched the heavens rain fire across the sky, streaks of violent light across their faces like a strobe light. It’s the most intense astronomical phenomenon she’s ever seen, and she’s opening her mouth to talk about burning balls of gas and lightyears and red dwarfs and supernovas when the Colonel’s hand slips into hers and all her words leave in a single silent exhale. His hand is dry and cold, and there’s probably dirt in the creases and calluses of his palms and under his fingernails. Neither of them have showered in three days. Daniel is smiling like the very first time Sam ever saw him look at Sha’re and the lines in Teal’c’s face are smooth. Sam curls her fingers around his and feels his thumb brush the underside of her wrist, and turns her gaze back to the sky.

 

 

Sam has a balcony attached to her room in Atlantis, and before she goes to sleep she looks at the stars of a galaxy farther away from home than she ever dreamed of, sitting in her high school auditorium with her number two pencil slippery in her fingers bent over her SATs. She thinks of the Goa’uld, the Wraith, the Ori, the Ancients, time travel and time loops, wormhole to distant planets and alternate universes with no second chances, she thinks of paperwork and needing alliances for food and checking the purifiers for water and the anomaly Dr. Fay had noticed yesterday in the oxygen levels and that the scientist team studying trees on the vaguely Amazonian planet is three hours late to check in and--

 _oh,_ she thinks suddenly. A streak of light flashes across the sky, and Sam wonders if it died a natural death.

 

She misses the stars.


End file.
